I was fortunate enough to spend Friday night in Row 2 Section 15 Grandstand at Fenway Park for the Bosox-Mets interleague series game one, a collision not seen since 2006.
Despite the fact Mets shortstop Ramon Martinez was channelling 1986 and Bill Buckner, making two errors and avoiding a third thanks to a first baseman swipe, the game took a backseat to the venue that is the finest in the United States for sports fans.
The mere name, Fenway Park, is elegiac in this era of corporate sponsored vestibules. And it lives up to its reputation.
I had not been there in 30 years. I spent many college days in the bleachers watching Red Sox-Yankees games for two bucks. Seemingly every time I went Sparky Lyle would blow a lead to Rice, Lynn, Hobson, Fisk, Burleson ... basically whomever entered the batter's box in the late innings.
I was there for the Fisk-Munson collision and dusty dust-up at home plate, there watching Lou Piniella rip clutch hit after hit into the seams of the Boston outfield, there when Billy Martin and Reggie Jackson went at it in the dugout during a tense moment. Imagine how THAT would blow up in this day and age. Cataclysmic, to say the least.
Fenway Park has evolved into the sweetest experience a sports fan can have, regardless of allegiance. The entire atmosphere is intoxicating. The Green Monster, the scoreboard guy running out between innings to update National League scores, the intensity of the fandom ... it is quintessentially Bostonian.
Fenway is Mecca, not merely the hub of the city but the center of the New England universe, from Maine to the nether regions of Connecticut. Boston is a college town, a provincial liberal hotbed, a bookish antiquarian metropolis, revolving around the sun that is Lansdowne Street's chief occupant.
If you are a sports fan, your life is incomplete without visiting this holy place. The fans are knowledgeable, passionate and remarkably mellow after the lifting of The Curse and the success of recent years. I actually heard a guy say to his buddy on Yawkey Way after the game, "It's great to talk baseball with people from out of town ... we don't have to hate them if they're not Red Sox fans, do we?"
A stark contrast to sitting in the bleachers in '78 with my brother, when somebody beaned him on his Yankee helmet with a rock. Yes, a rock. We're not talking Aerosmith here, we're talking A ROCK!
In those days fistfights swept the stands throughout the nine innings, to the extent that you could see ballplayers on the field turning their heads to peruse the brawls. I kid you not. Ron Artest would have fit right in.
That's all changed.
Now the fans -- no less passionate -- behave. Management has neutered the hooligans. The music played throughout the inning breaks dictates the vibes, playing to the positive emotions, even including Quiet Riot's cover of "Cum on Feel The Noize." While I would have preferred Slade's original, that's a tepid quibble. At least Noddy Holder gets a royalty from ASCAP.
The place crescendoes in the bottom of the eighth with Neil Diamond's "Sweet Caroline," when the Fenway faithful en masse arise and intone with a fervor the chorus, "Good Times Never Seemed So Good."
Let me be clear here: I am not a Red Sox fan. But the tidal wave of American emotion sweeping the stadium at this moment was unlike anything I have ever experienced at a sports venue. Astonishing and heartfelt doesn't do it justice. You simply must experience the high.
The Red Sox Faithful have mellowed, for sure. The anger is tempered. They have tasted the sweet nectar of success. David Ortiz may be done, the hated Yankees may be en route to a title (unquestionably, IMHO, with the reviled A-Rod as World Series MVP, you read it here first ...) but it doesn't matter.
The economy sucks, times are tough, but go spend a Friday night at Fenway and your spirit will be infused with joy.
Life is good at Fenway Park. --- Harry Parmenter.
